1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the provision of communications services and, in particular, to the addressing of a party through use of a network independent address.
2. Description of Related Art
The manner with which a party is addressed for communications service has historically been network specific. Take, for example, the concept of party addressing in a conventional telephony (voice or fax service) type of communications network. A party in the telephone network is addressed by a set of numeric digits having a certain format (i.e., the party's dialable phone or fax number). Conversely, in a data communications network like the Internet, a party is addressed by a collection of numeric digits arranged in a certain format (i.e., the party's Internet address). Finally, for purposes of e-mail communications, a party is addressed by a collection of alphanumeric characters having a certain format (i.e., the party's e-mail address).
The network specific formats for party addressing in different networks often share nothing in common, and thus each address, even if assigned to the same party, is limited for use in contacting that party only within the network for which the address is valid. In this regard, conventional network address handling procedures do not allow a telephone network to route a voice or fax call to a called party based on a caller specification of the e-mail address for that called party. Similarly, the prior art data communications network does not possess the ability to route a data message to an addressee party based on an addressor specification of a telephone number for the addressee party. Because of these limitations, a party must not only keep separate addresses for each network, but he must also make each of those addresses known to those persons having a desire to contact him.
There is a significant interest in the communications industry, especially with the proliferation of many different kinds of communications services (voice, data, e-mail, fax, and the like), to move towards an addressing solution where a party would be assigned a unique, world-wide address that is usable for routing communications of any type and in any network. While progress is being made in this area, the legacy solution of having a different party address assigned in each network remains in effect, and an interim solution is needed to bring an improved level of convenience to the issue of party addressing as technology moves towards unique party identifications.